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I'm a huge Wes Craven fan, so I was expecting to like this, but I didn't expect it to unsettle me as much as it did. It's silly in the special way Craven movies are, and often very funny. Lots of the special effects look weird and dated (though they do look more 2002 than 1994, so congrats I guess), and for maybe 90 minutes of the 110 minute runtime I thought this felt like the buildup to a buildup, the first ten minutes of a suggestion of fear stretched out a little too long. but when the final climax starts up, I have to tell you, it scared the hell out of me. In the back of my mind…

Earlier today I was reading a story about a man whose penis was stolen in 2012. Fei Lin, a 41 year old man from China, was sleeping peacefully when he was rudely awoken by a bunch of men. They shoved a bag over his head, pulled down his pants and then before he knew it they were gone. Taking the bag off his head, he looked down only to be completely shocked that his penis was missing. The thieves had chopped off his dick and had run away with it into the night. The police never found the men who did it, nor did they find his cock.

Every kid knows who Freddy is. He's like Santa Claus, or King Kong. -Heather Langenkamp

Probably my favorite Nightmare on Elm Street sequel as it might be even better written then the original. Wes Craven comes back for the 7th film and manages to recreate the tone and mood from his 1984 original. What I think is so ingenious is that he does this not by ignoring what went wrong with all the previous sequels, but actually using it for his story.

Craven knows that Freddy Krueger killing the Elm Street teens in their sleep has been overdone and it has become to familiar. It needs to be something that our protagonist knows is a threat, but will be unbelievable…

A lot of times I have a spiral notebook on the coffee table while I'm watching a movie, mainly to write down a quote I find hilarious or the name of a list I have to add the movie to once I find myself on Letterboxd again. I thought I would take the time to let everyone know what I wrote while watching Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

An almost blank page with four possible list additions and the single thought - "crotch grab, SO CGI!"

New Nightmare came out in 1994. This is an awkward time for horror films, a film can either be chock-full of the best practical special FX after a decade of perfection, or riddled with a…

After "Freddy's Dead" leaving many fans with sour tastes in their mouths, Craven came back with full force to give people a brand new "Nightmare" film, but with a twist, and that twist being that it's about him making a new film in the series as a means of containing some form of evil, and the film in question is the one we're currently watching and unfolds as he puts it together.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a fan of meta narratives, but part of the reason why for some (particularly Craven's own "Scream" or most recently "The Final Girls") is because it distracts from the narrative to point out things that the audience themselves can put together and…

My roommate had never seen it before, though I did get him to see the original and Dream Warriors first. His verdict: "Wow, that was fuckin' awesome!" Which is correct. It is. Seeing it in 35mm was a real treat.

It feels weird to say this about the seventh movie in a series but for me this is easily the best Elm Street film. However, it does make me chuckle that Wes Craven was brazen enough to write it into the script that his creative work is of cosmic importance in the battle against evil.

“The problem comes when the story dies. It happens a lot of different ways, the story gets too familiar, or too watered down by people trying to make it easier to sell, or it’s labeled a threat to society and just plain banned. However it happens, when the story dies, the evil is set free.”

It’s also very smart, it feels like Wes really thought it out, and it’s an interesting spiritual predecessor to Scream. I did struggle to keep up at times, but it may have been cause I was as sleep deprived as Heather and Dylan.

I’m always a fan of meta films and I also like it when directos get to return to a franchise that has been ruined by lesser directors.

Considering the original isn’t even Wes’s ending, this kind of feels like the definitive Nightmare film. As far as I’m concerned, this and the original are the only ones that exist.

To start, what a great concept. I think it's just brilliant and a precursor to what Craven managed to achieve with Scream. Freddy also looks cool as fuck. The new face makeup, the bone claws, the trench coat, he looks MILES better than the original.

I really liked this a lot to begin with and was intrigued to see where they could take such a premise, but it started to trail off with some shoddy child acting and terribly aged CGI effects.